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For the marijuana legalization movement, 2014 ends the way it began: with legal changes that showcase the movement’s momentum alongside its problems.

Tucked into the 1,603-page year-end spending bill Congress released Tuesday night were a pair of provisions that affect proponents of cannabis reform. Together they form a metaphor for the politics of legal cannabis—an issue that made major bipartisan strides this year, but whose progress is hampered by a tangle of local, state and federal statutes that have sown confusion and produced contradictory justice.

First the good news for reformers: the proposed budget would prohibit law enforcement officials from using federal funds to prosecute patients or legal dispensaries in the 32 states, plus the District of Columbia, that passed some form of medical-marijuana legalization. The provision was crafted by a bipartisan group of representatives and passed the Republican-controlled House in May for the first time in seven tries. If passed into law, it would mark a milestone for the movement, restricting raids against dispensaries and inoculating patients from being punished for an activity that is legal where they live but in violation of federal law.

“The enactment of this legislation will mark the first time in decades that the federal government has curtailed its oppressive prohibition of marijuana, and has instead taken an approach to respect the many states that have permitted the use of medical marijuana to some degree,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said in a statement to TIME. The California Republican’s work on the issue reflects the strange coalition that has sprung up to support cannabis reform as the GOP’s libertarian wing gains steam and voters’ views evolve.

At the same time, the House chose to overrule Washington, D.C., on the issue. Last month voters in the District chose to liberalize its marijuana laws, passing an initiative that legalized the possession, consumption and cultivation of recreational marijuana. The move, which was supported by about 70% of the capital’s voters, paved the way for D.C. to follow in the footsteps of Colorado and Washington State by establishing a tax-and-regulatory structure for cannabis sales in 2015.

Hope for medical marijuana legislation getting through the Louisiana Legislature this year is not dead, but a Senate committee quashed on Wednesday (April 30) the best shot of setting up a medical marijuana industry in the state.

The Senate Health and Welfare Committee killed a bill, sponsored by Sen. Fred Mills, R-New Iberia, that would have set up the tightest law in the United States regulating the prescription, dispensing and use of marijuana for medical purposes, Mills said. A pharmacist by occupation, Mills said his past experience running the state board of pharmacy and “months and months” he spent drafting the legislation led him to believe his bill was best chance of getting lawmakers on board. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s comments early this year that he was open to medical marijuana in Louisiana added hope.

Though the Legislature legalized marijuana for medical purposes in 1991, there’s no mechanism in current law that allows for the legal dispensing of the drug. Doctors can legally prescribe it, patients can legally use it, “but they don’t have a middle man,” Mills said. Mills said after the defeat of his bill that he would work with Rep. Dalton Honore, D-Baton Rouge, sponsor of companion legislation in the House, to take another crack at it. If that fails, he’ll bring it back next year.

The bill was involuntarily deferred by a vote of 6-2.
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